Finished Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I picked this up awhile ago after hearing good things about the series. And the author was born in a city near me, which was nice.This book is structured as a series of stories told by each of the characters. It begins as they gather for a pilgrimage to the mysterious Time Tombs on planet Hyperion. Each character in turn tells the tale of why they are on this trip as they progress on their journey.

Reading the book took longer than expected. At the beginning, I found that I kept putting it down. Not that it was bad, however it does move a bit slow in the beginning. Once it was about halfway into the first character's tale it picked up. The book finishes with all of the tales complete, and the destination reached. Totally set up for the second book, The Fall of Hyperion, which I am excited for.

Each character has a different style of story.There is the priest, Father Lenar Hoyt. His tale resembles that of a pulp novel jungle explorer who happens upon an indigenous tribe.

Sol Weintraub, a man of Jewish decent. A story of tragedy, and probably my favorite of the bunch. His daughter was researching the Time Tombs, and after an event began aging backwards. Not only aging backwards, but each day's memories stripped away when she woke. After watching his 20-something daughter age into an infant, Sol joins the pilgrimage to Hyperion in hope of curing her.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, a soldier. His tale is the most action packed out of the bunch.

Martin Silenus, the poet. Best selling author in the galaxy, hedonist, and man who is extraordinarily old. Haunted by his muse, he is traveling to Hyperion to complete his greatest work.

Brawne Lamia is a female private investigator from the planet Lusus. Her story reads like a cyberpunk noir detective tale.

And finally "The Consul". A diplomat who tells a story of love and why he actually isn't was he appeared to be at the beginning of the book.

I have the next book in my possession, and will start it after I read H.G. Wells Journey to the Center of the Earth.

For years, I have been disappointed with the state of desktop OCR in Linux. All I wanted was to scan a document, OCR it, and save it as a searchable PDF. However, nothing I tried could come to the simplicity of Abbyy Finereader or Nuance's Paperport software.

For awhile, OCRFeeder sort of worked. Importing from the scanner only worked sometimes, exported PDF files were larger than those that Paperport created, and the OCR quality itself was poor. And then, completely by accident, I ran into the program Paperwork.

Paperwork is a document management program like Paperport. And it works really well! Finally, I can scan, OCR, and actually have it work! The software will save scans as an image, with accompanying OCR file. However, if you need a PDF to email, it can export to a PDF. Search function appears to work, I was able to scan a few examples and then search for a phrase. It brought up the correct document and highlighted the search phrase.

Worth looking into if you need a open OCR and personal document management solution.

This article makes me chuckle. My wife swears by her K-Cup brewer, and uses it every day. However, I would say she doesn't like coffee.. She drinks the brown water that the pods make, but MUST have a ton of flavored creamer to make it palatable.

Checked in on the status of Haiku OS, and saw that Beta 1 was finally released.I was a huge BeOS user, and still have my original Intel release disks, as well as the 4.x series and the last 5.x install disc.

I need more excuses to make strudel. My last attempt was my best so far. I have really gotten much better at pulling the dough thin.Perhaps I should experiment with some kind of savory filling instead of cherry or apple. That way, I won't fee as bad when I eat it all.

Sometime in the last couple weeks, it appears that the apps pinned to the nav bar, or in the app tray are no longer there.Clicking "Add Apps", and then attempting to click the star yields no result. I can click on the app icon in the Add Apps screen, and launch them that way.

All channels on the server have this issue. All using the default theme. On current stable release, and updates are current.

2018-09-09 Update: Resolved! The issue stemmed from the "term" table in the Hubzilla database having the "crashed" status. After repairing the table, the app tray functions returned to normal.

Big Brother has arrived - and it’s you. Investigate the lives of citizens to find those responsible for a series of terror attacks. Information from the internet, personal communications and private files are all accessible to you. But, be warned, the information you supply will have consequences…

Orwell is a new governmental security program that has the power to survey the online presence of every person in The Nation. It can monitor all personal communications and access any computer. To preserve the privacy of citizens, human researchers examine the data Orwell finds and decide which pieces of information should be passed on to the security forces, and which should be rejected.

Selected from thousands of candidates, you are Orwell’s first human researcher. And when a terror attack rocks the Nation’s capital city of Bonton, Orwell, and you, are immediately put to the test. Starting with a single person of interest, you'll help the security forces build out and profile a network of potential culprits.

But are these people really terrorists? What does the information you reveal to Orwell say about them? What if you find out things about them that not even their loved ones know? What is the real price of maintaining the security that the Nation is yearning for?

Yesterday I managed to break the screen on my phone while it was in my pocket.Looks like the digitizer is damaged, as it no longer accepts touch input. While I'm waiting for repair parts to come in, I decided to install Sailfish OS on my wife's old OnePlus X.

Here are some initial thoughts:

Likes:1. Love the overall UI aesthetic. And the icons look gorgeous on an OLED screen. I was a huge fan of Windows Phone from 7 all the way to the end. I find may similarities to Windows Phone 7 and 8 (and that isn't bad at all!)2. Designed for one handed use. No back/home/etc buttons. Simple gestures control everything.3. Card/Cal DAV works out of the box with my Baikal(Saberdav) server.

Dislikes:1. SMS works well, but MMS will not download messages.2. Software selection between Jolla store and OpenRepos isn't great. I would say Windows Phone in its early days had a larger selection of indie applications. Im missing things like a native Matrix client. Would be nice to have a Twitter/Mastodon combo client like Twidere.

On a side note, I can see why Jolla is bringing the OS to feature phones. It seems very light, and the interface combined with a decent core set of built in apps would be a good experience on such a device.

The local Bergner's department store is going out of business, so I dropped into see if any amazing deals could be had (There were none).They did have all of the store fixtures for sale, including mannequins. A whole army lined up like a scene from a scifi film.

In addition, they had reclining and sitting models. These appeared to be angry, and judgmental. A great addition to any living room!

For the last month, my NTFS formatted data partition was showing up as read-only in Linux.I found the culprit tonight: Windows 10 fast startup had been re-enabled at some point. Because I obvious didn't know what I was doing when I turned it off the first time.

It has been a long time since I have done any PHP work, and was considering a Hubzilla "app" as a little project.This would be a dice roller for use by role players, or "Just because".

I have a private channel on my server which is used for a play-by-post Dungeons and Dragons campaign with my daughters. Since I work evenings, it makes it easy to keep track of and continue our game when schedules do not mesh. At the moment, I have been doing the dice rolls for them.

This is how I envision the mod working: The player would type what action they are taking as usual. With the text formatting buttons, there would be a new dice roll button. Clicking it would present the user with a selection of dice types, and a box next to each for them to input how many of that type they want to roll. Clicking the finish button would add a tag like [diceroll] into the message.

The message ID will be recorded in the database along with the roll requested, and generated result. When the message is posted, only then will the result be displayed. This keeps unscrupulous players from cheating by using preview to see what the result is before posting. And since only one dice roll can be created per MID, it prevents someone from generating a roll, then editing the message, deleting the roll and adding a new one.

I will also have a regular "app" interface. Rolls created in this standalone mode will not be stored in the database.

This is all in the planning stages at this point, but I don't think it will be that difficult.

Been having issues with my WIFI lately, so I checked into a firmware update.

I am ashamed to say, I have been two major versions behind in the OpenWrt/LEDE world.After a few minutes of reentering the port forwards for torrents, and my servers I am back up and running.All seems slick, but we will see what happens when my wife starts a video streaming binge.

E3 had some stuff that interested me this year.My FPS playing daughter and I are looking forward to the new Halo.

The Division 2 could be promising, but I'll keep my expectations low. The setting of the new game is promising. I loved New York in the first game, but after running around tall buildings in the winter for many months, I have grown weary of it. Washington D.C in the summer should be more varied. Plus the cosmetics wont be limited to a hundred styles of ski jackets and beanies.

Ooblets now has dance fights, which is pretty fun. Also looking forward to Don't Nod's mini adventure in the Life is Strange universe (Captain Spirit).

As far as E3 Sales go, I ended up grabbing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for $6 (I have yet to play it. Loved the Human Revolution).In addition, I also acquired an Xbox copy of Dreamfall Chapters. I was up to chapter 3 on my PC, but since one of my daughters has taken over the machine that it was installed on, I don't have time to finish it there. Since my kids have shown an interest in adventure games, it will be cool to show off the beginning of the game to them.

My Linden tree bloomed this week. When the breeze blows in the evening, it smells amazing!Not a single honeybee sighting though Thus far this year, I have sighted zero honey bees. Fortunately, there are quite a few bumble bees. There is one (possibly two) hives of them on my property.

Tinkered with my old notebook running FreeBSD yesterday.I have had an issue getting WIFI stable. It will ping, but a few minutes later the connection fails to work.After a quick RTFM session, I found out that I was missing the kernel modules for wifi encryption.

So far, the lack of wifi configuration tools like WICD or Network manager are the only weak points in FreeBSD.I'll have to master the tools provided in order to change access points.

Otherwise everything works as it did on Linux, with the exception of the trackpad. In Linux, the track pad used the two finger gesture for scrolling. In FreeBSD, scrolling is achieved by the little scroll strip on the right hand side of the track pad (like in Windows).